BEAT THE DEVIL'S TATTOO

You cannot fight it, all the world denies it. Open up your eyelids and let your demons run.

[gravesjonah-blog]

If anything, Jonah thinks he should be less surprised by these developments than he is—hadn’t he killed in the name of immortality? Whether Adam Foxcroft’s body was only stolen, or whether he somehow was given new life, Jonah shouldn’t be surprised. But he is surprised. So much he’s sick with it. After all he, more than most, has a vested interest in the dead staying dead and buried. He, more than most, fears what the ghosts of this town could tell.

He wasn’t at Foxcroft Cemetery when Adam Foxcroft’s coffin was opened, he’d stayed far away as though repelled, though he’d worried the whole day anyway that he had made the wrong choice, sent the wrong message. He still isn’t sure if he did: which action is more suspect, or if suspicion is simply a cloud blanketing the whole town, that no one can escape out from under even if they made all the right choices, even if they tried.

But now the cemetery draws him in. Quiet, as night is falling. He feels a strange compulsion to check that everything is as it should be: no earth overturned, no signs that there’s more than only one body missing in Foxcroft. Had he an inch more daring, he might be compelled to take up a shovel himself, exhume his own sins only to make sure they stay buried—but he isn’t. He’s never been bold without someone guiding his hand.

So instead he walks between stones, alone until he isn’t, and only then does the horrible sinking feeling reach him: for someone trying so determinedly to avoid all suspicion, this is perhaps the single worst place for him to be. With no ready-made excuse, he only stares for a moment, and then a moment more, says the first thing that comes to his mind: “I won’t ask if you won’t.”

[unyielding--black]

location: the water tower. o p e n

A leg stretched out above the water tower’s edge, foot hovering precariously in the air. The wind blew through Valerie Pineda’s hair, dark waves whipping about her face as she lingered there, calm as can be, with the most curious of smiles creeping along her face. She began to recite to herself,

“… and everyone who lives and believes in Me…”

She inched closer to the tower’s precipice, considering. Smiling.

“… will never die.”

Her head cocked to the side, envisioning the fall itself as an airy laugh rippled past her lips. There’d be a commotion, surely; sirens blaring, cops cars flashing red and blue, people whispering and shoving as they gathered around the base of the tower, swearing they’d just seen a figure plummeting from the top and wondering to themselves who’d just become Foxcroft’s latest casualty. Valerie shut her eyes.

But there would be no body. “Do you believe this? John 11:26.”

It was the sound of distinct clanging that startled her out of her reverie. Valerie’s eyelids flickered open and she snuck a casual glance past her shoulder towards the tower’s ladder as someone neared the end of their climb, though she remained rooted to the spot. 

[gravesjonah-blog]

The water tower has never been his and Val’s place. When he thinks of Val he thinks of, obviously, Sweetwater Church. Also thinks about slouching in the front seat of her car, all those times she’d picked him up from school, taking long drives just to kill time until Jonah felt safe enough to go home.

He drives his father’s car, now, they share it. When he’s without it, he just walks, a lonely figure on the side of the road with his jacket collar pulls up around his face. He stays away from the Church too—it seems darkly absurd that the only place he’d felt safe as a child became the same place he was inculcated into immortality, led meekly to the sacrifice like Isaac, except for the fact that God didn’t intervene, and Jonah wasn’t the one to die. Somehow, he still feels like he’s the one Val sacrificed.

All that is to say: he isn’t looking for Val. He isn’t looking for anyone.

If it weren’t for the fact that the ladder was too steep of a climb to the top for him too want to turn right around and climb down, he might have done it. But it is, and so he only hovers at the top, fingers curled around the highest rung, staring at Val like he’s seen a ghost, like he’s angry—and, in a way that feels almost childish, he is, because it just seems unfair.

“If you’re preaching, aren’t you supposed to have an audience?” he mumbles more than he speaks, lacking the bite he thought he’d had stored up and waiting, like even after everything it’s still harder than it should be to talk that way to Val.

[bonedustt]

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[gravesjonah-blog]

I am as ugly as I seem Worse than all your dreams Could ever make me out to be

[cassidyholloway]

In the midmorning lull when the day’s main supply of bread had finished baking and the breakfast crowd had come and gone but before those seeking a sandwich or some special desert for their lunch arrived, Cassidy liked to try and plan out some new recipes for the bakery. She collected old cookbooks, the ones from before everyone was so concerned about low-cal, gluten-free, tasteless bread-like substances. It wasn’t that she couldn’t respect those folks with dietary restrictions, she made a gluten free sandwich bread for one of the mothers in the suburbs of Foxcroft on a regular basis, she just didn’t want to eat it herself. It was harder to get motivated about those kinds of recipes. 

It was spring, but the town wasn’t feeling the joy of rebirth with the weight of Adam Foxcroft’s funeral looming over them. She wanted to make something that would offer a little lightness, a little sweetness to try to cut through the gloom. She found a recipe that she flagged for summer – it was a bit too early for peaches yet, and kept flipping pages until she landed on a grapefruit curd tart with chamomile whipped cream. 

“Interesting,” she murmured to herself, reading the recipe. It seemed right up her alley and something that would provide the feeling she was going for. She was so engrossed in the recipe that when the little bell above the door rang, she actually jumped, one hand pressing against her chest. Composing herself quickly, she offered a smile. “Welcome to Sticky Fingers, what can I get for you?” 

[gravesjonah-blog]

It’s amazing to him, how much time he spends just—killing time. 

It’d felt more purposeful, before. Secret church meetings and long drives. Not doing it all alone. Now he’s fully aware of every wasted breath, every wasted minute, the limbo he lives in in between work and sleep. And neither of those things are very fulfilling, either, they’re just things that he has to do. Scheduled, reliable.

And the thing about Foxcroft is that there aren’t too many places to kill time. The thing about Foxcroft is that it’s fucking boring, especially when it’s all you’ve ever known. And Foxcroft has shrunk to him: he stays away from Sweetwater Road, now, the church at the end of it. And he stays away from the swamps. And he doesn’t like Foxcroft’s cheery main street, either, but it’s all that’s left to him.

It’s boredom that drives him to duck inside, the one avenue he can say that he hasn’t exhausted yet. He can’t say he’s a regular patron of Sticky Fingers, and it seems obvious why the moment the door closes behind him. He’s neither sugar nor spice, he’s just—there. And, if there weren’t a bell announcing his presence, he might have just as easily not been there, ducking out just as quickly as he’d ducked in.

But it’s too late for that. As Cassidy smiles at him, he doesn’t smile back—it’s nothing personal. If he’s going to smile, it’s not going to be for cupcakes. “Um,” he says, at first, sparing a glance at what’s on display before giving up and asking instead: “what do you recommend?”

[gravesjonah-blog]

willapotter:

Hot coffee spilled off the table and into Willa’s lap, but she almost didn’t notice. Before she could crumple up the newspaper, the ink was bleeding off the page — her dead friend’s name was bleeding off the page. She froze. Only when someone pulled the paper from the table did she snap out of it. 

Suddenly she felt the hot coffee on her jeans, which were now stained and sopping wet. She looked up to see what kind of idiot had spilled their coffee on her. 

Jonah Graves. Willa didn’t know him, but it was a small town, and small towns spread nasty rumors. The dropout with a dead mom. That’s all she’d heard. Nothing more. Still, dead mom and all, Willa wasn’t exactly the sympathetic type. She knew what loss felt like and it didn’t excuse being such a klutz. 

“Are you gonna grab some fucking napkins or are you just gonna stand there?”

After all these years, he’s gotten used to people looking past him. It followed a predictable pattern: someone would look at him, and then they’d focus on a black eye or a split lip, and then they would look away, and they’d never really look back. If they did, it was something furtive, looking away the second they were caught, like he was doing something wrong, just by being there. A secret hiding in plain sight, his family’s dirty laundry aired in public. In small towns, good fences made good neighbors, and he was the one who took something that happened behind closed doors, made it public for all to see and whisper about behind his back—but never to his face. 

For so long, it had infuriated him. Now it seems like an unexpected blessing. He isn’t black and blue anymore, or he is much more rarely, but now he’s got something that he’s taking much more care to hide than he ever did the bruises, and he doesn’t want anyone to look. Doesn’t want anyone to see.

But, of course, when he basically runs over Willa Potter’s table in a middle of a coffee shop, there’s not much he can do about it. He doesn’t care that she’s sharp with him—he probably deserves it but, more than that, it snaps him out of the place he’d gone in his head at the sight of the headline. He can’t afford that—with the whole town talking about Hazel and Adam and the trail gone cold, if he froze every time he heard their names he’d never move again.

And so he trades sodden newspaper for dry napkins, dropping a stack of them in front of Willa without ceremony—his gratitude is an abstract thing, a flicker kept down deep; on the outside, he’s as sullen as ever. “Sorry,” he says, though it’s clear from his tone he’s anything but. His next words, too, are not sympathetic: a loaded question, a kneejerk deflection. She’s snared in the net of the town’s suspicion; he didn’t do anything to place her there, but it’s in his best interest that she stays there. “Planning on paying your respects?”

[willapotter]

Since Adam’s death Willa avoided main street as much as possible. Everyone always had something to say to her; one of her best friends was murdered and most people believed her other best friend did it. She was the girl caught in the middle and everyone always had questions — “Did you tell police everything you know?” “You have to have a lead that can find the Foxcroft kid’s killer.” “It was Neil wasn’t it? Did you help him? Is that why you don’t seem to care?” “What are you hiding?”. 

Willa couldn’t stand it. The only reason she made her way into town most days was because it was the home of the only decent bar in Foxcroft. But today was different. Willa was going stir crazy and with Adam’s funeral coming up, she needed the fresh air, the sun on her face, and so she headed to Dark Horse to grab some coffee. Black, with far too much sugar. 

She sat down by the window, a newspaper was pulled apart all over the table. When Willa looked down, she saw the headline —- “ADAM FOXCROFT TO BE LAID TO REST NEXT SUNDAY.” The first line of the story read, “Will his killer be there? Will Neil Monroe be there?” 

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Willa said, so startled and frustrated she nearly spilled her coffee. 

[gravesjonah-blog]

He’d seen the news. He wished he hadn’t.

So many questions he doesn’t know how to answer: is it strange if he doesn’t go? is it strange if he does go? Somehow, it feels like there’s a right decision and a wrong decision, if only he could figure out which was which. And when the stakes are death, are murder, there’s a lot riding on the answer. There’s a part of him that wants to cave, ask Val what she thinks he should do—but no, he won’t do that. Not anymore. He can’t trust Val to lead him anywhere but astray. Fool me twice.  

But he can’t escape from it. Everywhere he turns, he hears Adam Foxcroft, and then like an echo, Hazel Abrams, sees their faces staring out at him. He remembers when he thought it had stopped, sometime before the eclipse, before Adam had gone missing. It feels like the last time he’d been able to exhale. When he thought he’d gotten away with it. 

And all he wants is a fucking cup of coffee, something to make him feel halfway human after yet another late-night shift, but there that headline is again, staring out at him from the tabletop when the sound of a voice draws his attention over. He sees it, he doesn’t see Willa, and he definitely doesn’t see the leg of the table until he’s almost tripping over it, jostling the table and spilling coffee down his wrist to drip dark onto the newsprint, making the letters—ADAM FOXCROFT—run and bleed together.

“Fucking shit,” he curses, spat out through his teeth and, only then, with seemingly everyone’s heads swiveled towards him at his outburst, does he look up and see Willa. “I’ll just—” he says awkwardly, before gathering up the sodden newspaper, crumpling it in his hands.

[foxcroft-rpg-blog]

“Monsters stuck in your head. We are, we are, we are monsters under your bed. We are, we are, we are monsters oh, oh.”

JONAH GRAVES / TWENTY-THREE

↳ LORE

You better slam the door behind you before they slam it on you, boy. Because there’s a reckoning coming, and you’re first in line – and you know it. They told you that you were the “chosen one”, but now you see the only thing you’ve been chosen for is a scapegoat for if, no when, things go wrong. Better act quick, boy. Better find someone else to fill the role they gave you. 

JONAH GRAVES IS A DREAM STEALER.

trigger warning: abuse

↳ HISTORY

Every part of him has been bruised, and when he looks at his skin, Jonah can remember every single one. He never knew his mother, only that her death was the reason his father was drunk more often than he was sober, and that he was convinced Jonah killed her. Little did Jonah know, one day he would become the killer his father always told him he was. Although, the path that’d lead him there didn’t involve drugs or crime – but church. The only public outing Jonah and his father did together was go to Sunday church service. It was the only time Jonah felt safe from his father while he was around him. He couldn’t show up drunk and he definitely couldn’t hit him while they were in the Lord’s house. Still, you can only hide bruises so well, and you can only come up with so many excuses. People gave he and his father strange looks for years. When the preacher asked Jonah how he was, he asked as if he already knew the answer. It wasn’t until he was in high school that someone finally spoke to him straight. “You know, if you use a frozen bag of peas and rub vinegar on them, they usually go away faster.” Valerie – or Val as she’d told him to call her. She wasn’t much older than he was, but she acted like it. Over the years, Val became like an older sister to Jonah. When his father decided he wasn’t worth the gas, Val would pick him up from school. They’d eat too much fast food, sneak into the movies, and drive around Foxcroft until he was sure his dad had passed out drunk. 

Val became Jonah’s rock – which is why he trusted her so much when she finally invited him to the special church meetings she went to. Val didn’t say much about the meetings, and anytime Jonah asked if he could go she got angry. When Jonah was seventeen he dropped out of school, and not long after, Val invited Jonah to a meeting. Jonah had seen Val angry, but he’d never seen her as serious as she was when she told him that the meetings had to be their secret. Joining Deathless changed everything for Jonah. At first he was skeptical of the group. They believed in striving for immortality, and that the only way to truly honor God is to become like him. They took humanity being made in God’s image literally – but Jonah didn’t know how far that went, at least not at first. They kept him in the dark for five years. When he’d join, Val told Jonah that a time would come that they’d ask something of him, and at that point it’d be too late to turn back. He couldn’t refuse, and if he did there’d be consequences. Afraid, Jonah’s loyalty to Val kept him willing and faithful to the cause – even when they asked him to kill for them, to sacrifice a resident of Foxcroft to the swamps. Val assured him that they’d all done it, a lie that both terrified him and comforted him at the same time. Despite fear and uncertainty in his new faith, Jonah agreed.

Terrified and distraught, Jonah’s sacrifice was far from planned. He’d gone out into the swamps one day to clear his head when an opportunity presented itself. Red hair and a bright yellow bike. It flashed before his eyes faster than he could move. He pushed her off her bike and into the water face first, used her bike to hold her under until she was still. She was still and Jonah felt nothing. It took days for the dread to set in. It was only after he’d killed Hazel Abrams that he began to look at Val and the rest of the Deathless with the same fearful eyes he’d had before he killed her. Jonah distanced himself from Val and the Deathless, and drank and drank, hoping to forget. He even went to a psychic – shortly after realizing how stupid that sounded. Yet, this girl, Shae, almost seemed like the real deal. For some reason, Jonah found himself visiting Shae more and more, especially after they found Hazel’s body. She calmed his nerves, even though he knew her visions weren’t real. They were friends – at least at first. On the night of the eclipse, the night Adam Foxcroft died, the night of the eclipse, something changed. Police reopened Hazel’s unsolved murder case, believing it was linked, and the dread set in again. Dark thoughts clouded his head, and Jonah found himself not in his own mind – but in Shae’s, or rather her dreams. Walking in his best friend’s visions made him realize why her predictions felt so real; it was because they were. Now, Jonah finds himself in Shae’s mind more than his own, and is using her visions to quell his nerves, but he may not like what he sees, or what Shae sees of him. 

THE MASKS YOU KNOW, THE PEOPLE YOU DON’T …

[billskarsgod]

[aseaofquotes]

Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star